Global study finds high success rate for hip and knee replacements

February 15, 2019  18:34

After reviewing thousands of case studies going back 25 years across six countries, generalisable survival data is now available for the first time to estimate how long hip and knee replacements are likely to last.

The findings of researchers, funded by the National Joint Registry, from the Musculoskeletal Research Unit at the University of Bristol have been published in The Lancet. These findings show that eight out of ten total knee replacements and six out of ten total hip replacements will still be in place after 25 years.

"Over two million hip and knee replacements have been performed in the UK since 2003 and patients often ask clinicians how long their hip or knee replacement will last, but until now, we have not had a generalisable answer." said lead author Dr Jonathan Evans, National Joint Registry Research Fellow and Clinical Research Fellow at the Bristol Medical School; Translational Health Sciences (THS), based at Southmead Hospital.

"Previous studies have been based on much smaller samples. At best, the NHS has only been able to say how long replacements are designed to last, rather than referring to actual evidence from multiple patients' experiences of joint replacement surgery. Given the improvement in technology and techniques in the last 25 years, we expect that hip or knee replacements put in today may last even longer."

Hip and knee replacements are two of the most common and effective forms of surgery. Yet even in the best-case scenarios, they will ultimately fail due to processes such as infection, fracture, normal wear and tear or reaction to wear particles. In many of these cases, patients require revision surgery which is more prone to failure, associated with poorer function and more expensive than primary surgery.

Source: bristol.ac.uk

Follow NEWS.am Medicine on Facebook and Twitter


 
  • Video
 
 
  • Event calendar
 
 
  • Archive